Hotels, restaurants, bars, clubs and other service establishments often freely dispense nuts, fruits, candies, mints and other hard candies to their guests or customers. Often these establishments place the comestibles in a bowl, dish or plate and offer them to the guests or customers. When the comestibles are offered in this manner, guests or customers must scoop up or grab the comestibles with their hands. Such scooping or grabbing presents several problems. First, the comestibles may be inadvertently spilled or scattered from the dish or bowl, thus causing waste and making an unsightly display. Second, for health and sanitary reasons, people may be unwilling to eat comestibles that have been offered in a dish or bowl because the comestibles may have been touched by other persons.
Various solid comestible dispensers were thus developed to allow hotels, restaurants, bars, clubs and other service establishments to place the comestibles in an enclosed reservoir with an attached dispensing mechanism. Such devices allowed the customer to turn a handle or push a lever to cause a predetermined amount of comestibles to drop down a shoot into the customers waiting hand. These dispensers avoided the problem of spilled comestibles and also prevented customers from touching the comestibles in the reservoir. Thus, these dispensers were both neat and sanitary.
However, due to certain design characteristics, these prior dispensers have been beset with one or more of the following shortcomings: (1) the prior dispensers failed to dispense a consistent quantity of comestibles; (2) the prior dispensers had a tendency to become jammed with the comestibles, thus preventing the flow of comestibles to the customer or guest; (3) the prior dispensers had a tendency to guillotine or mutilate the comestible thus dispensing particles and portions of the comestibles and causing waste.